Biography

Ray Atkins (b. 1937, Exeter, England) has devoted his career to painting from direct observation. Working across landscape, figure painting, and drawing, he has developed a practice centred on prolonged observation and the changing conditions of light, weather, and season.

Now based in the French Pyrenees, Ray continues to produce large-scale paintings in situ, using a method rooted in direct observation and informed by David Bomberg's approach to painting. Each place where Ray has lived, from London and Reading to Cornwall and now France, has prompted a distinct phase in his painting.

Ray began his artistic education at Bromley School of Art (1953–1955). Following National Service in Cyprus (1956–1958), he returned to Bromley where Frank Auerbach became his tutor. He then studied under William Coldstream, Claude Rogers, Andrew Forge, and Auerbach at the Slade School of Fine Art (1961–64), winning the Young Contemporaries Graphic Prize (1964) and the Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship (1965).

Ray taught at Bournemouth College and the University of Reading before moving to Cornwall in 1974 to join the Painting Department at Falmouth School of Art, where he taught for more than twenty years. The landscape of Cornwall became an increasingly important subject. Living at Carn Marth, he gave expressive form to the industrial landscape through prolonged plein-air observation.

Since 2008, Ray has lived and worked in the French Pyrenees. Its forests, mountain ridges, and gardens have become the focus of a new body of work developed through extended observation. Despite deteriorating eyesight, he continues to paint outdoors each day, remaining committed to the observational method that has defined his career.